DOE stimulus drops $2.4 billion on carbon sequestration

Steven Chu, head of the Department of Energy, has announced the latest plans …

The Obama administration promised to work towards producing renewable and environmentally friendly energy, and the Department of Energy has been a big beneficiary, taking home a significant chunk of the stimulus money. Over the last few months, attention has been focused on getting the money flowing into projects designed to update and improve the electric grid. Friday, in a speech to the National Coal Council, Steven Chu, head of the Department of Energy, announced that the stimulus package will also fund major work towards carbon capture and storage, which could allow us to avoid many of the consequences of continued burning of fossil fuels. The planned spending, which includes $800 million specifically for cleaning pollutants out of coal plant exhaust will total $2.4 billion, which should provide the nascent field a significant boost.

To an extent, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a response to the fact that burning fossil fuels is likely to remain an economically favorable approach for far longer than we'd like it to be. Coal is currently the cheapest fossil fuel, and the one with the largest described reserves; unfortunately, it's also the dirtiest, both in terms of traditional pollutants and in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. CCS promises to allow us to continue to use this and other fossil fuels without the activities contributing to further climate change or ocean acidification. But the technology is hardly specific to coal; other industrial processes, such as chemical manufacturing and cement production, release significant amounts of CO2 as well. It may even be possible to use this technology to draw CO2 directly from the atmosphere.

In some contexts, the capture portion of things is already in use. In many areas, captured carbon dioxide is injected into natural gas fields in order to increase their productivity. Unfortunately, we don't fully understand whether these geologic formations will be sufficient to contain the carbon on the time scales that would be required.

The past administration had helped foster a few pilot CCS projects, but its plans to build a large-scale demonstration project were shelved indefinitely. So, to an extent, the programs announced by Chu represent the nation's first real attempt at getting CCS technology off the ground.

As mentioned earlier, a third of the total stimulus spending promised by the DOE will go towards a general clean coal effort. These should help limit the sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury emissions that accompany the burning of coal, and determine how best to integrate these pollution controls with a CCS system. The intent is to get both the government and private companies experience with commercial-scale systems, and to explore the range of geological features that can be used successfully.

The lion's share of the money, just over $1.5 billion, will go to CCS technologies that are flexible enough to work in any industrial setting, regardless of where the carbon's coming from. According to the DOE, "the industrial sources include, but are not limited to, cement plants, chemical plants, refineries, steel and aluminum plants, manufacturing facilities, and petroleum coke-fired and other power plants." The DOE is similarly agnostic when it comes to what happens to the carbon afterwards, provided it doesn't wind up in the atmosphere. Mineralization approaches (which often involve injection into geological formations) are mentioned, as are two specific technologies: feeding the exhaust into an algal biofuel production facility, and compressing it for transport and storage using the earth-bound equivalent of a ramjet.

For me, however, the key steps in making CCS viable are getting small but necessary outlays. $50 million will go towards identifying geological formations that should provide the sort of long-term, stable storage that we need, while another $20 million will go to training a generation of people with the expertise to make this work. The DOE is looking to develop programs for both scientists and engineers, providing them with skills in geology, geophysics, geomechanics, geochemistry, and reservoir engineering, all of which will be necessary.

The DOE will shortly be posting a notice of intent describing how it intends to distribute the funding and evaluate the applications for these projects. After giving the public and industry a chance to provide feedback, money should start flowing late this year or early next. After years of false starts, this could be a very significant change.

37 Reader Comments

I'm disappointed that the such a large amount of the stimulus money has been put towards maintaining our current energy system. We should be rid of fossil fuel's all together, and as the article mentioned, coal is the dirtiest. Steven Chu, as head of Department of Energy, should be interested in creating more clean, renewable energy sources, not prolonging the inevitable by taking steps to minimize CO2. That should be an end to our energy dilemma, not a means.

That money has just been flushed down the toilet.Carbon sequestration is voodoo. The worst kind of hype driven junk science.

I only hope we end up with some interesting fringe discoveries or efficiencies found along the way. It may not be a total loss if those involved are creative.

EDIT: For instance, I have followed the research (touched on in the article) wherein algae are fed carbon dioxide (and other pollutants) that would otherwise be released into the air. Something useful is created from a waste byproduct. That's the right kind of thinking, but a lot of the leading ideas are just time and money sinks.

Carbon Capture and Storage is a highly theoretical process which isn't practical. It should be viewed no differently than the hydrogen fuel technology for cars that the last President funded to no avail. Big Oil hyped hydrogen; Big Coal is doing the same with CCS.

In fact, as a result of the energy-intensive CCS processes, a theoretical CCS coal plant uses about a third more coal to produce the same amount of electricity. CO2 put aside, what about all the other pollutants released into the air? There's Big Coal for you.

Coal power plants are actually remarkably efficient if you look from the standpoint of the process used to generate electricity, and it doesn't seem feasible to make them any more efficient without at least doubling their costs.

If the government has so much money to spend on environmental causes, why can't it support realistic alternative energy like wind, solar, and hydroelectric. Not freezing new solar plant construction for "environmental reasons" as it did before.

For each ton of coal that is burned, you get 3.66 tons of CO2. You could keep it under pressure (56 atmospheres would make it liquid at room temperature), but it's a lot less dense than coal is (graphite is 2.2 g/ml, liquid CO2 at 56 atm and 20°C is 0.77 g/ml.

So if you try to put the CO2 back into the mine you dug the coal out of, for each liter volume you took out, you'd have to put about ten liters of liquid CO2 in.

If you can get the CO2 to react with various minerals to make carbonates, you can do better than this 10-1 ratio.

With natural gas the picture looks much better, as a mole of CO2 has roughly the same volume as a mole of CH4.

FTS is a chemical process that's been in use since WWII that makes fuel from carbon sources and H2. DotyEnergy has recently been granted over 60 world patents refining this process into what they call RWGS RFTS. Basically, by using off-peak wind energy, combined with CO2 captured from coal plants, they can make gasoline and diesel fuels for about $60 per barrel.

The process is clean, cheap, proven, monopoly-proof, and available now, it just needs funding to build plants and CO2 to process... The off-peak wind energy is practically free (in some markets they paying people to take it because the grid can't support it, yet, another part of Obama's plan). The fuel has virtually no contaminants, and the plant will have virtually no pollution impact to the environment.

Don't belive this? I was a skeptic too. DotyEnergy has released more data than any other alternative energy program I've come across. They'll even sell you a complete copy of their research (they're certain you won;t steal it, it;s all patented!). They've had hundreds of experts go over the numbers, and it really is valid. Like I said, they've been doing this since WWII already, this is just a unique way of combining several proven processes to get an end result, and a slew of patents for making the process (heat exchanges, catalytic engines, etc) much more efficient on larger scales.

Pumping CO2 into the ground may or may not work, and either way it's expensive, and we don;t have enough ground to pump it into anyway. Burning oil in our cars plus coal in our plants is killing the planet, but if we can replace some of the coal with wind, use more wind to power the plant, and use the CO2 from the coal plants to make gas, then we can reduce by more than 40% the CO2 output of the planet, and that's a managable number.

No, it's not a permanant solution, but it will give us the 30-50 years we need to build a replacement electric grid that CAN handle variable loads, and enough time to make better batteries for cars, and eventually let us completely replace fossil fuels. In the meantime, we'll be free of middle east controll and we'll nevner see gas go about $2.50/gallon.

Oh yea, you can drive your current car, and we can use our current pipelines and fuel infrastructure too!

dotyenergy.com. If you have money to invest, get your lawyers to call them. The company is worth about $40 million now. In 5 years they'll have a 75MW plant running selling fuel and they'll be worth hundreds of millions, in 15 years they could have plants across the nation and be worth trillions. You could have a 3 order of magnitude return on your investment. This is REAL science, proven processes. If I had the cash, I;d be investing too. (I will be soon!)

That FTS/DotyEnergy scheme doesn't appear to do much to solve the problem; rather, all it does is delay the carbon's release into the atmosphere.

Granted, it may get additional energy out of this coal derived CO2, without burning even more coal, but it would appear to be just a stop-gap way of reducing total CO2 emissions per unit of coal-derived energy. The real advantage of this technology would seem to be as an intermediate step in converting to a hydrogen-electricity infrastructure.

He might as well burn the money, but that would generate a lot of co2 as well. $2.4 billion for rubber tubes to connect cows' butts to farmers' basements would be more promising in sequestering greenhouse gases.

This effort being sold as "green" is entirely disingenuous. They need to shut down the coal plants as nuclear plants are brought online. With $800 billion in stimulus pork Obama could have built several hundred nuclear plants to replace all fossil fuel plants and provide the excess electricity necessary to transition to electric vehicles. This $800 billion is money stolen from future generations, and unfortunately, the government is consciously choosing NOT to provide those generations with something meaningful for them and the planet.

Except sequestering carbon may require as much as 30% of a plant's energy, so you end up having to build 30% more plants, mining 30% more coal, transporting 30% more coal... paying 30% more on your power bill and paying who knows more in taxes to pay for the silly "clean coal" subsidies...

every time i read an article that involves "Obama" and "global warming" and "energy" - i always hit Command-F, and type in nuclear....

and as usual, the most abundant energy source in the universe, the weak nuclear force, is looked down upon because of anti-rational religious beliefs.

And if you say "what about the waste?" - you have obviously never driven from Southern California to Denver. Or thru Colorado. Or thru New Mexico. Or thru Nevada. Or thru Arizona. Or thru North Dakota. Or thru South Dakota. Or thru Alaska. Or thru Montana. Or thru Kansas.Or thru north Texas.Or anyplace where we have nuclear missiles - where we already have great security nearby.

and before you say "sure.. in someone else's backyard!" - i listed my state first.

You can't tell me you've ever driven thru the southwest or northern tier states and say "uh... yeah, you could probably find a few hundred thousand acres for the stuff."

I was shocked when I saw that so much of the DOE's stimulus money is going to sequestration.

The emerging pattern of the Obama administration is one of relentlessly political decision making, including numerous instances, like this one, where the policy sounds great, but the details are so disappointing. Closing Gitmo only to expand Bagram is another. Similarly, Obama seems to be buying the support of Wall Street by making TARP into a solid-gold enema for the banking elite, a great way to fund your reelection campaign at everyone else's expense.

Right now Obama's legacy is a good dose of infrastructure investment and lifting the ban on stem cell research. Everything else is good talk and Bush-like action. Shockingly, he's not the shining hope the left thought he was.

In fairness, he has laid groundwork for good action on climate change and health care reform. But his track record thus far is making me very skeptical of how those efforts will pan out. He'll put a big smiley face on them at the end, though, and half the people will buy the bright yellow turd sandwich. Nothing like 8 years of Bush to destroy your wholesome expectations and replace them with desperate stupidity.

Enjoy your wiretaps, I'm out.

PS: Solar is the way. Nukes aren't enough to fuel electricity, cars, cooking, heating, and all that for ourselves, let alone the developing world.

gsfprez, I find it amusing that the same elected officials that are promoting carbon sequestration are the same fools you would have us put in charge of developing nuclear waste management strategies.

Most of the uranium mining industries and nuclear camp are happy to gloss over the real ongoing health problems caused by uranium (American Indians with cancer, or the Kakadu tailing's dam polluting the environment due to "leaks"). I'm no anti-nuclear religious zealot, but uranium isn't exactly a "clean" and planet friendly fuel.

If only they would also spend a lot in planting trees, it would solve a whole lot more than just carbon sequestration. Even with quite a large budget, the solutions to our current predicament will probably be concrete years from now. We have to start somewhere though. And there is no better time than NOW.

Am I the only one who is facepalming right now? How can the DOE be so irresponsible with their money?

I read that dotyenergy.com intro - and don't see how it can be beneficial. You're using wind energy to convert CO2 to combustible fuel, which is then burned again? You are going to lose a ton of that energy in all of the physical transfers.

from this, it looks like 25% of energy is made renewably. This means that if energy use was but by 5%, that would make renewable be ~31% of the total. Lower-use > nuclear > mess-up-and-then-cleanup-later.

Originally posted by AngelaW:If only they would also spend a lot in planting trees, it would solve a whole lot more than just carbon sequestration. Even with quite a large budget, the solutions to our current predicament will probably be concrete years from now. We have to start somewhere though. And there is no better time than NOW.

Fine, plant trees. There are no trees where I live. Wait, I see a tree outside my window. Wait, all I see are trees. A road and then trees. Where do you live, the desert? Is that where you want to plant the trees? Where aren't there trees?

For everyone complaining about the cost, both in terms of extra coal burned and and in terms of capital (tax dollars), consider: it's SUPPOSED to be expaensive.

Well, not expensive, but realistic.

The point of the exercise (which many of you missed) is to start figuring out the true cost of burning coal. If the govenrment's policy is "We want to produce energy, from whatever source available, which is affordable, sustainable, and which produces minimal/manageable effects on society and the environment", then you have to level the playing field among all the players (solar, wind, nukes, gas, coal). You can't do that with coal until you find out what it costs to produce the energy cleanly. When you do, then you can compare the final, true cost with the costs of production from other sources.

Hell yes it's expensive to do these programs. If it was free the coal companies may have already done it. Personally, I think the coal industry should have to fund 50% of the cost, but my lobby isn't as big as theirs.

You CAN produce energy and neglect the environmental costs, but then you end up with production methods that don't account for them (google Chernobyl). Or just look at some photos of the air over Shanghai.

Originally posted by Joe Buck:For each ton of coal that is burned, you get 3.66 tons of CO2.

Sooooo.... a ton of coal contains 3.66 tons of CO2?

Or is this including the carbon released by mining and delivering it? And references please, if that's the case.

Atomic weight of Carbon ~ 12Atomic weight of Oxygen ~ 16

Atomic weight of CO2 ~ 12 + (16 x 2) = 44

44/12 ~ 3.67

This is highschool-level basic science. I'm tempted to ask if you're a product of the American school system, but as it's a Sunday, I'll just assume that you're still recovering from Saturday night .

Holy crap. First of all, coal isn't pure carbon. A ton of coal does not yield a ton of elemental C. Second, coal combustion is incomplete (ever heard of ash?), so even if coal was pure carbon, your math would still be way off.

"You CAN produce energy and neglect the environmental costs, but then you end up with production methods that don't account for them (google Chernobyl). Or just look at some photos of the air over Shanghai."

This is a fine knee jerk reaction to nuclear, what I don't understand, is why Chernobyl of all things keeps coming up in these discussions??It did pretty much exactly what it was designed to do in the situation it was put into. I don't have a degree in nuclear physics or anything even close, but it seems from what little I do know, when you perform an experiment on a breeder reactor with little to no controls on the process, you gets what you asked for.IMO Nuclear is the way to go, at least until a viable solar in space with a microwave transmission to the surface becomes feasible. I have yet to see any other alternative energy source likely to plentiful and consistent enough to provide for what will undeniably be an increasing demand as more lower tech countries become more advanced.

Oh, and in response to "plant a tree, save the planet," While I might be mistaken, I seem to recall trees are not the most CO2 efficient converters. I'm pretty sure I've seen data that shows you'd be much better off concentrating on oceanic sources, like algae, for CO2 scrubbers.

Apparently carbon sequestration is a hugely complicated and pretty expensive technology that has some advantages:

It helps the coal industry and is therefore popular with a big lobby.Huge projects like this are something that are easy to throw money at, therefore the government loves them.

The government shouldn't be allowed to fund its pet technologies in the name of "global warming". My three examples I always bring:

1) Solar power in Germany (More than generous subsidies (57 Cent per kwh *sick *make my country where the sun never shines into the country that takes the biggest part of worldwide solar panel production. Idiocy in perfection)2) Biofuel: Perfect environmental technology in the US and Europe. For the farm lobby that is. Other than that the energy savings are minimal, food prices go up and the environment is worse off than before. Great going (biofuel from sugar cane in brazil seems to be different)3) Nuclear fission. Do not even want to know how many billions went into this technology that has been 20 years from availability for approx. 50 years.

There should be a worldwide law that governments can only set the environment. Like a carbon tax for example (or at most by building a better power infrastructure that can incorporate more types of energy) . Increase the cost of carbon emission and let someone who actually knows what he is doing find the way HOW to do it. And those whining greens should learn to live with the fact that the result may not be to their liking.

Nuclear power for example. Or not so sexy things like better insulation. Or biofuel from sugarcane. Or a gas turbine instead of coal power. Wind power of course. Or something mundane like more diesel cars.

The stimulus package is a subject of great controversy. The stimulus adds up to almost a trillion dollars. It is an enormous cash advance giving emergency cash to stricken industries that are in need of immediate cash. A little less money will be taken out in taxes for working stiffs to help them pay bills, and also to private lenders in order to stimulate lending and credit. It's very similar to when a normal person needs a payday loan to get a little temporary debt relief? That’s what the stimulus is for. Read more click http://spam/...ash-advance-economy/

The thing about carbon sequestration is this: liquid carbon dioxide is highly volatile (becomes gasseous at -56C or -70F), and is one of the least viscous liquids known to man.

You would be hard pressed find a substance more suitable for escaping from holes in the ground, or finding its way through cracks or fissures, or just working its was through packed soil and rock, than liquid carbon dioxide.

As I see it, CCS will result in an ever growing reservoir of subterranean carbon dioxide that will have some level of leakage proportional to the amount sequestered. That means, that eventually, the amount leaking out will equal the amount being put in, and without mineralization (or other ways of solidifying co2), all of the CO2 put int will leak out eventually (and in timespans measured in a few 100 years).

That means, that eventually, the amount leaking out will equal the amount being put in

Sorry but on what basis is this assumption? Just interested. After all millions of cubic metres of petrol gases have been trapped in the same stone formations for millions of years without anything leaking. I think some real scientists should be able to make a reasonable assumption if this is trapped down there or not.

It would be an understatement to say there are better uses for this money. Simply keeping it off the national debt would be one. Building a nuclear reactor would be another. People gripe that we have to store high level nuclear waste for thousands of years before we can forget about it. Great. How long does CO2 have to sit underground before it is no longer a problem to let it out?

Originally posted by slugabed:"You CAN produce energy and neglect the environmental costs, but then you end up with production methods that don't account for them (google Chernobyl). Or just look at some photos of the air over Shanghai.

quote:

Originally posted by Technophobia:This is a fine knee jerk reaction to nuclear, what I don't understand, is why Chernobyl of all things keeps coming up in these discussions??It did pretty much exactly what it was designed to do in the situation it was put into. I don't have a degree in nuclear physics or anything even close, but it seems from what little I do know, when you perform an experiment on a breeder reactor with little to no controls on the process, you gets what you asked for.

My comments on environmental costs were directed not at the nuclear industry as a whole, but at the mentality that thought that Chernobyl (in particular) was a design worth building. The Soviet government did not make safety and environmental costs a priority, so the nuclear industry there built a reactor that was inexpensive and simple. As you said, they got what they paid for.

Like you, I don't care for people who yell "Chernobyl" or "Three Mile Island" when the subject of nukes comes up. They just reveal their ignorance and don't advance the discussion.

Coal can be between 50%-95% carbon (by weight). Most of what's burned for energy is in the <80% range.

Less than 80% ?. I confess to being a little surprised; my own personal SWAG guestimate was 80%-85%, and I didn't see any point in quibbling about side issues -- at 80% you'd still produce more than 3x as much CO2 (by weight) as starting coal, and impurities are problematic on their own.

Anyways, my point was simply that it's pretty clear where the 3.66 figure comes from.

Also, in the context of climate change, global warming, and dumping excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, it doesn't really matter -- if low grade coal is only 50% carbon, then the irresponsible bastards just burn twice as much of it, and release even more mercury and what not, all the while telling everyone how dedicated they are to good environmental practices. Going by past history, any fossil fuel industry claims and promises need to be examined with careful skepticism.